New Fundraising Options Designed Just for redditors

We’re constantly impressed by all the big and small altruistic fundraising campaigns that the reddit community has supported. For a while now, we’ve been trying to help encourage some additional tools for redditors to be able to collectively raise funds. For nonprofit projects in particular we wanted to find some low or no fee options so that as much of redditors’ money goes to the cause and not to payment processing and other fees. We also wanted to see more built in accountability and fraud checks, so that redditors can be more confident that their money is going where they think it is. Additionally, we wanted easier ways for mods to integrate fundraisers into their subreddits.

We now have two new and promising tools that should help make it easier and more reliable for future fundraising and charitable giving.

Safe. Anybody with a U.S. bank account can receive money (more countries coming soon), and Crowdtilt will help verify beneficiaries of campaigns. Beneficiary can not be changed/hidden. Any fundraiser with “verified 501(c)(3)” status means that the recipient of funds matches IRS info for the same non-profit.

Low fee. Crowdtilt is waiving their fee for this collaboration, so only a 2.5% fee for secure credit card processing applies (less than PayPal and other sites).

Can also work for various groups or other campaigns that are not official non-profits to collect funds for meetups etc.

Dwolla & Stripe (redditdonate.com) – This one is brand new. Dwolla (online payments company) and Stripe (payment system for developers) teamed up to create redditdonate.com. This allows for non-profit fundraising where you can pay with Dwolla, or any credit card (through Stripe). Some of the main benefits of their tool:

Easy to use for mods. Subreddit moderators can drop a donate button into their sidebar allowing redditors the ability to donate directly to the nonprofits, no third-parties holding the money.

Safe. Limited to verified 501(c)(3) non-profits who have to confirm accounts.

Open ended time frame.

Low or no fee (Dwolla: $10 and under = free to send/receive money, $10 and over = flat fee of 25¢, Stripe: 2.9% + 30¢ for any transaction).

These two tools are each a bit different and will develop further based on feedback from the reddit community. We hope they make awesome fundraising projects easier, less expensive, and more secure. We’re still talking to other companies on your behalf as well. Let us know what else you would like to see!